Venezuelan authorities issued an arrest warrant on Friday for the owner of a television channel that takes a critical line against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Intelligence agents arrived at a home owned by Guillermo Zuloaga seeking to arrest him and one of his sons Friday night, but their whereabouts were unknown, defense lawyer Perla Jaimes said.
Zuloaga is president and majority shareholder of Globovision, the country’s only remaining channel on the airwaves that is stridently opposed to Chavez.
A court issued the warrant for the businessman and his son, also named Guillermo, citing accusations of illegally keeping 24 new Toyota sport-utility vehicles stored at a home owned by Zuloaga, Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. Zuloaga and his son are charged with usury and conspiracy.
Zuloaga has denied wrongdoing, saying the charges were trumped up in an attempt to intimidate him. Police and soldiers raided his property and found the vehicles in May last year, but there had been little action in the case for months.
The arrest warrant came a week after Chavez publicly lamented that Zuloaga remained free.
“They caught that man with a bunch of cars in his house and that’s a crime — hoarding. And he’s free and he has a television channel,” Chavez said in a televised speech. He called it a case of “structural weakness” in Venezuela’s legal system.
Zuloaga, who also owns several car dealerships, has said he stored the cars on the property for safekeeping because one of his dealerships had been robbed.
He also is facing other accusations in court, including criminal charges filed earlier this year accusing Zuloaga accusing of making false and offensive remarks about Chavez at a meeting of the Inter American Press Association in Aruba.
The press association’s president, Alejandro Aguirre, condemned the latest action as political persecution.
“Once again it’s been shown that in Venezuela there’s no independence of powers, an essential value of democracy, since the judicial branch seems to act every time the president speaks or orders it,” Aguirre said in a statement. “It worries us that this is happening increasingly frequently.”
Opposition leaders also strongly condemned the Zuloaga arrest warrant as an attempt by Chavez to intimidate critics and distract from domestic problems including a recession and the recent discovery of rotting food in government storage at a port.
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